by Kirk Allmond
“Vic. Shut up and get over here.” was the response.
I grinned from ear to ear and burst out of the bushes.
14. Our New Life
I ran up to my brother and gave him a big hug. “Marshall, glad you made it. How was the trip?”
“Well, I don’t think I’m going to be making many more road trips in that car.” He replied.
“Have you seen my truck? I think we’re both stuck here for a while. Let’s go inside and find some food.”
Just then Leo stepped out of the bushes, and John stepped out from behind one of the brick pillars connecting the main house to the summer kitchen.
“We saw the headlights and came to back you up.” John said.
“Geezus, I didn’t even hear you, and I was listening as hard as I could. You two are freaks!” I joked.
“Tookes, you were making enough noise to disguise an elephant passing by.” Said Leo.
The mood was happy; I hadn’t seen my brother since the previous Christmas. He was looking well considering what he’d just been through.
“Marshall, these are my friends, Leo and John. They saved Max and me on our trip down here, but Candi didn’t make it.”
Over the next two weeks, our new life sort of became normal. We had Candi’s funeral and buried her in the boxwood gardens the first day. The ceremony was nice; Mom and Marshall both gave beautiful speeches. I hope Candi was happy, wherever she was.
We built fortifications around the house, enclosed the garden and fountain in the rear courtyard, we’d started visiting all of the neighbors. Of the five houses within walking distance, only one person was alive, and he was bitten by his wife that morning; she’d been bitten the previous day by a wandering zombie.
Each time, we re-killed the infected, and loaded up the food they had, paying extra attention to cleaning supplies, and personal hygiene products. We had enough soap to last a year or more. We took toilet paper, and Kleenex and paper towels. Anything of use that we didn’t haul off we noted in a spiral notebook. Inventory of tools, materials, gadgets, clothes, things like that. Most of the neighbors had some kind of livestock, cows, pigs, horses, or goats, which we turned out into the fields. We opened up the barns, and all the gates we could find to let the livestock roam. There wasn’t a lot of worry about traffic; we hadn’t seen a car on the road.
We’d lost power at the farm a few days prior in a windstorm, we were prepared for that to happen, and the farmhouse was equipped with a 15kw whole house generator. Power supply was always sketchy this far out on the country, they’d installed the automatic backup generator to keep the well pump running and the place heated if the power went out for an extended period over the winter. The gennie was connected to a thousand gallon buried propane tank, shared by the commercial kitchen and gas fireplaces throughout the house. We unplugged everything in the house except the refrigerators, and were using about forty gallons each day. We were counting on two weeks worth of power for refrigeration before having to refuel the propane tank.
Every adult except Leo carried a gun of some sort. Marshall had taken a liking to the scattergun; he was a surgeon with that shotgun. Leo refused, she was better with her kukri style machete than any of us were with guns, except John. He carried the 9mm Glock, his favorite because it had the largest magazine capacity. I once watched him hit a zombie from four-hundred yards through the scope of my rifle. He hit it square in the head using his hands and eyes to adjust for bullet fall and windage. I’ve never seen him miss. Not even that time he put the AK on full auto while sitting in the window of my truck bouncing across a field.
Even with my stash, we were pretty low on ammunition, lower than we’d like. Of course, knowing that there were over half a billion people on the continent, I’m not sure there was any such thing as ‘enough’ ammunition. In visiting the neighbors looking for survivors, we were able to recover a pretty good haul of various weapons, with a little bit of ammunition for each.
By the time we’d been there a month; the ammunition situation was getting pretty dire. In conversation, I mentioned that there was a sportsman’s club about two miles upstream from the house, and maybe we should go check it out to see if they had anything worthwhile there. From that moment on, John was convinced that we had to go there. I understood, he has this amazing ability, but if we run out of ammunition, he’d be back to normal. Leo on the other hand, had talents that weren’t so specific. Not that it was a competition between them, but I think they did each have a zombie-count. By my tally, John was ahead by four. I was in third place, six behind John, but only because my rifle bullets traveled faster than his 9mm. I was getting pretty good at the 400+ yard shots with the 30.06 I’d named Sammie and scope, but I was hoping to find a more powerful rifle and bigger scope. I wanted to be able to hit a walking zombie at the bottom of the driveway from my spot inside the upstairs balcony. I’d been in that gun shop a few times, mostly when we were visiting mom, and I could sneak away without Candi knowing where I was going. The last time I was there was about a year ago, they had a brand new Barrett .50 cal sniper rifle on a shelf behind the counter. The $9,000 price tag for the rifle and scope combination was laughable.
We started to make our plans for the run up to the gun club. We decided that John and I would go, leaving Leo and Marshall to guard the house, and Mom to watch Max. I knew the woods the best, and there was no way John was going to stay home.
Our plan was to head upriver to the fishing area, where we could get a good view of the back of the club. There were game trails all up and down the river that we could easily follow. I brought my Sig and the 30.06; John had loaded out with his Glock and the small .410 shotgun full of birdshot. I’m not sure what he planned to do with that, even though I’m certain he could hit a zombie in the eye from a hundred yards with it.
We left about seven in the evening, just at twilight, walking up the river. The two miles took us about twenty minutes. It’s amazing how much better shape I was in after only a month of leaving my old sedentary life behind. We crawled into the bushes about fifty yards from the clearing that made up the back ‘yard’ of the sportsman’s club. There was no sign of movement or life anywhere. The outdoor 125-yard shooting range stood empty; there were no arrows in the Styrofoam deer targets in the archery area. There was no one trying for one last trout before full dark.
Something struck me as not quite right though. There were no noises at all. No crickets chirping, no birds singing, no frogs croaking, nothing. Not even a breeze stirring the leaves. I half stood to tell John about the oddness when something slammed into my back and I ended up face down on the ground. I turned my head to see John firing his gun, muzzle flashing so rapidly it looked like one constant jet of fire in the darkness. I was unable to move to see what he was firing at - his hand blurred like Leo’s when she moves at top speed. This was John. I didn’t have to look. I knew each of those bullets were lethal.
He reached down still firing with one hand and flipped one of the two spare magazines out of its pouch in his belt up into the air. A millisecond after he squeezed the trigger on the second to last bullet, the empty, used magazine fell out of the bottom of the gun, and he caught the fresh mag with the pistol’s grip, like he actually threw the magazine into the pistol. His hand came up and slapped the fresh mag in place as he fired the round in the chamber. The entire reloading process had taken less than one second. To this day I’m not sure if I dreamed it, because I blacked out right afterwards.
15. The Sportsman’s Club
I regained consciousness with a start and a gasp. The pain in my back caught my breath at the halfway point. I focused on relaxing the muscles in my back, and breathing slowly. Over the course of what I think was an hour, I focused on breathing. I couldn’t see anything, I was wearing a blindfold, and there was not a single bit of light leaking in around my nose, leading me to believe I was sitting in a dark room. The room was completely quiet. I focused on feeling my bonds, I was duct taped at the wrist, with very little
wiggle room. It felt like I was in a wooden chair. I shifted my weight and felt a little give in the chair.
I thought about Max, he’d lost his mother; he’d lost all of his friends, most of his toys, almost everything he knew. Now he was surrounded by paranoid, gun toting adults. At least he had his Gramma and Uncle Marshall. He was at a place he’d been coming to his whole life, and although it had changed a bunch with our defensive improvements, it was still our home.
I began to formulate a plan based on assumption and my senses. I had to be inside the indoor shooting range, it was the only thing I could think of that explained the complete lack of any sound. I’d been inside this range before, there were two doors. One door led out to the stairs heading up, the other to a vault where the owner kept most of his guns. There’s no way it would be open, but I had to check. This group holding me would have to be monumentally stupid to leave me alone in a room full of guns. I couldn’t yet attest to their intelligence level, but they did manage to capture me, even with John on my side.
The pain in my back had subsided to a solid ache, but the stabbing pains were gone. ‘No time like the present to start this shindig,’ I thought to myself.
With that, I leaned back on two legs and then over on to one leg. I bounced three times on that one leg before the chair splintered, and I collapsed in a heap, causing the stabbing pain to return. I laid there on the ground trying to straighten my legs without wrenching my back. Once they were out from under me, I rolled over on my side and started working my wrists back and forth. The duct tape stretched some, rolled a little and little by little I worked my hands free. If my back had not been so sore, the process would have gone much faster. As it was, I didn’t have much strength to flex my shoulders; every time I tried it took a number of minutes before I could breathe again. Finally free, I removed the blind fold and discovered I was indeed in the pitch blackness. A quick check of my pockets showed I’d been searched and everything taken. I picked up one of the chair legs, and started slowly feeling my way to the wall.
I managed to find the wall, only cracking my shin once on a chair. I was glad that this was a sound proof room as the chair skittered loudly across the concrete floor I must have been just to the left of the door. I turned right at the wall and followed it around all four corners, past the locked vault door. Finally I found the door to the stairway, those two things confirming that I was in the vault.
The doorway was locked, but right inside the doorway I found the light switch. I flipped on the lights, and to my surprise, they came on.
The room was empty, except for two chairs, a bench rest, and the small pile of lumber that was the chair I’d been in. There was no telling when they would come for me, but I had no expectations of living through that encounter.
I had a sense that I’d been out for a couple of hours, although really I had no idea how long I was. It could have been an hour, or it could have been a day. If they’d captured or killed John, Leo would come looking for us when we weren’t back by midnight or so. If John had escaped, it was only a short walk to the farm. He would load up on guns and ammunition, bring Leo and the two of them would come for me. I hoped they were careful; the thought of anything happening to them on my account was unbearable. They were special, they were more than friends, they were my family, but more than all of that, they were Max’s protectors. We all were.
John had the Glock with him, which had a magazine capacity of seventeen rounds. He had two extra magazines - fifty-one bullets, plus one in the chamber to start with. John could have taken out up to fifty-two zombies. Or people, whichever these were. Mr. Spaulding had been the only living person we’d encountered, and he was infected by the time we got to him. If there had been more than fifty-two people here, what would drive them to continue the fight taking those kinds of losses? When you combine his speed and accuracy, any humans would have run away, unless something very scary was driving them. It was much more likely that it was zombies. If there were more smart zombies like Penelope, they could have collected undead from a long way away. There was only one reason I could think of for them to be staging a zombie army two miles from my doorstep. I felt so stupid, we’d been so focused on looking for survivors, looking for supplies, building up our own defenses, and I never thought to send out a scout. I had no idea what was at the edge of my property.
There wasn’t anything I could do, the heavy steel door wasn’t going to budge, I had nothing with which to even try to pick the lock; but besides that, I had no real idea how to.
I turned off the lights again, and stood just inside the door with my ear to the cinder block wall. I spent the next four hours counting seconds and wondering how long it would take for something to happen.
16. Escape
Finally, I heard something muffled through the cinder block wall. It sounded like footsteps coming down the stairs, and they were fast. I scrambled to my feet, and prepared myself as I heard the key in the lock. As the door started to open, I raised my chair leg over my head. The door opened, and I swung my chair leg like a bat. The first man through the door dropped like a stone. I caught his outstretched wrist with my second swing before he hit the ground, breaking his arm. The pistol fell to the floor.
I dove around the open door, which had swung into the room, and braced my feet against the wall and my hands against the back of the door. With all of my strength, I slammed the door into the second to enter the room. My back screamed in agony with the pressure. The door smashed the second man’s face in, I heard him hit the wall behind the door and slide to the floor.
The first guy’s gun was on the concrete next to him, and then it was in my hand, where it felt very familiar. The fucker had my Sig! That pissed me off, coming at me with my own gun. One hand pulled the door open, the other holding my gun. As the door cracked, I peeked around the corner. Every inch I opened the door, I could peer another ten degrees around the corner, until I’d methodically made sure the entire stairway was clear.
The second guy was holding a Glock of some sort; I didn’t immediately recognize the model. They were all such ugly guns, I never paid much attention. The Glock John carried was my first pistol, purchased for the name, before I knew any better. It was a solid gun though; John was certainly deadly enough with it.
I took a moment to check the pockets of both the dead guards; the first had the two extra magazines for my Sig, and a set of keys. I took his pocket knife, cigarettes and lighter. The next guy really had nothing of value, besides an extra mag for his pistol. From the top bullet I could see in the magazine, this was a .45 caliber. More powerful than my Sig, but not that much, and it felt oddly front-heavy in my hand. I put it in my waistband at the small of my back, and the magazine for it in my left back pocket. The Sig magazines went into my right back pocket where my wallet had been for years. I’d only recently stopped carrying my wallet. It seemed kind of silly now. No word on television for weeks. No planes flying overhead. There was nothing but static on the radio, even on the emergency frequencies. We’re within AM radio range of Washington D.C. We were operating under the assumption that the government had fallen, and operating under rules of personal survival.
There was no door at the top of the stairs. I didn’t want to leave these guys behind me, so I dragged them into the range and locked the door behind me as I headed up the steps. About four steps from the top, I leaned forward and put my eye almost level with the floor to peer out of the stairs. The store at the top of the stairs appeared empty. I almost giggled with delight to see the Barrett .50 still sitting on a shelf behind the counter. From my position, I could see the magazine still in the receiver, and a can of bullets behind it. I watched, waited, and listened for a few minutes, but heard nothing. A glance out the windows told me it was night time.
‘That’s a good sign; hopefully it’s the same night I was captured.’ I thought to myself. I crawled low and as quickly as my back would allow across the store to the wall of backpacks and grabbed the first one I could get to. It h
appened to be pink and gray digital camouflage. Leo would never let me live that down, but I wasn’t sticking around to be choosy. I slid and crawled behind the counter, and began to pull boxes of ammunition from the shelves below the glass case. Four boxes of 9mm, ten boxes of .45, ten boxes of .40 caliber, went in the pack. I found a single box of .12 gauge shells, before I slid the very heavy pack up onto my shoulders. I stood up long enough to grab the Barrett and box of ammo, and then sat down behind the counter.
It took me about a minute to figure out how to eject the huge magazine. It held twelve rounds. The scope came to life with the push of a button, but it took me a full five minutes to figure out how to get it into night vision mode. This rifle weighed a ton, much more than Max, maybe sixty-five pounds. It’s no wonder no one had taken it when they took all the pistols and shotguns out of the store. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make it out of this situation with it, but I had one task I had to take care of first, and this monster was just the thing for the job.
Behind the counter there was a doorway to a store room. I pulled the rifle and box of ammo behind me as I crawled in there looking for a roof access ladder. Just inside the door was a ladder up, so I slung the rifle over my shoulder, and started the climb. A stiff back, sixty-five pound gun, thirty pounds of ammunition in a backpack and a ladder with a locked door at the top was a recipe for agony. The fourth key I tried on the key ring opened the hatch. Up went the backpack and the rifle, and I started the second trip for the fifty pound can of ammunition.
Once on the roof with ammunition and rifle, I re-locked the access hatch, I crawled the perimeter of the roofline, looking for an exit. From the rear corner, there was a trash dumpster that was a roughly six foot jump, and then another six feet to the ground. That seemed like my best exit strategy. Back at the rifle, I counted the number of people I could see with the night vision scope; there were a hundred thirty-seven people down there. Two of them were carrying Savage Arms 111F rifles with scopes, but one of them had a bigger scope than mine.